All of Cheops's Comments + Replies

Answer by Cheops-1-6

Utilitarianism is not supposed to be applied like this. It is only a perspective. If you apply it everywhere, then there's a much quicker shortcut: we should kill a healthy person and use this person's organs to save several other people who would otherwise be healthy if not for some organ disfunction.

Lives are in general not comparable by amount, especially human lives, for a society to function. Which is why the person who pulls the handle in the trolly problem commits a crime.

This is where intuition can go wrong. If intuitions are not necessarily consistent, since most people avoid the trolley problem at all cost, then no wonder ethics built to be based on intuition is futile.

1Richard_Kennaway
And Peter Singer would say yes, yes we should. But only in secret, because of the bad effects there would be if people knew they might be chopped for spares. (Which rather contradicts Singer’s willingness to publish that paper, but you’d have to ask Singer about that.) Is there some Internet Law that says that however extreme the reductio, there is someone who will bite the bullet?
Cheops-3-8

There's no theoretical nor empirical reason to believe we know how to build intelligent machines that are more powerful than human in terms of planning, reasoning, and general executive abilities.

Cheops10

I agree. My main point is not that we're rational yet we disagree. But even as we strive to be rational in the future, we can still disagree due to imperfections in language. Perfect communication doesn't entail complete revelation of brain states, as with perfect communication humans can still be selective as to what to communicate, so self interest wouldn't be a major problem.

2Dagon
I have no clue how to determine which of the following contribute how much to any given disagreement: 1. human irrationality and inability to update correctly on new information. 2. (related to #1) human cognitive and attention limits - just can't remember and process enough to really understand the content of very complicated attempts at communication. 3. misalignment (adversarial/competitive motives for (mis)communication). 4. many other obstacles. 5. imperfections in language . My intuition is that #5 is pretty far down the list, ESPECIALLY if you separate "imperfect understanding of context of the speaker and their reasons for communication choices" as a new bullet point. This leads me to believe that language does evolve, but it won't make much of a dent in the conflict and disagreement we see among people.
Cheops10

Hello there. This seems to be a quirky corner of the internet that I should've discovered and started using years ago. Looking forward to reading these productive conversations! I am particularly interested in information, computation, complex system and intelligence.

2habryka
Hey Cheops! Good to have you around, you'll definitely not be alone here with these interests. And always feel free to complain about any problems you run into either in these Open Threads, or via the Intercom chat in the bottom right corner.